


silence speaks for you

by cailures



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Subways, Team Bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-25
Updated: 2014-08-25
Packaged: 2018-02-14 14:07:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2194644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cailures/pseuds/cailures
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve gets trapped on the subway with Thor. Awkwardness and a fight ensues.</p>
            </blockquote>





	silence speaks for you

**Author's Note:**

> FOR #7

Steve always found himself at a loss when talking to Thor. Not that he had many opportunities to interact with him—Thor didn’t sound that much time on earth and he spent most of it holed up with Jane Foster—and besides, Steve was busy too. Finding Bucky was going to take a lot longer than he’d hoped, and at this point, longer than he’d feared. However, if Steve had found himself on the subway heading to Chinatown to pick up dim sum from a restaurant that wouldn’t even deliver to Tony Stark with any of the other Avengers, he’d have been able to hold a conversation with them for the entire journey.

Natasha was a friend and the person Steve would prefer to spend an hour or so in idle conversation. All of the Avengers were supposed to be on vacation for vital team bonding exercises, as Maria had put it, or some time to sit around shooting the shit, eating food, and sparing, as Tony had. Natasha was taking them seriously enough that she refused to go over, yet again, all of the meager evidence Steve and Sam had scrapped together out on the road about Bucky. She might also be a little sick of the subject.

The only reason Steve had agreed to this was because Sam was out there and had good-humoredly agreed to text him updates at least a couple of times a day. They were mostly things like ‘hour billion, still staring at that same tree’ or ‘think i’ve got dust allergies now from too many libraries, might die, send backup’. It still helped.

Clint had told him that he felt betrayed that Steve knew how to text back. Apparently Natasha had convinced him that Steve was completely computer illiterate and hadn’t bothered to tell Steve about it. If he’d known, he would have been more than happy to play along for the rest of the week. She’d apologized for the oversight.

And the fact that Tony had threatened to send robots out after him blaring Sexy and I Know It 24/7 until he came in might have contributed a little. Steve was decently sure that he could find a way to stop them eventually, but he’s not great at undercover work, and he didn’t need more things blowing his cover. He'd already gone through a ridiculous number of fake identities. Fury was starting to give him value packs of five passports with different names on them at a time. The names were getting more and more sarcastic.

Anyways, Natasha was easy to talk to. She valued him enough to not try to matchmake where Tony could hear her, so he'd guess that she'd be happy to run through her list of possibilities. Or, she'd tell him about her last mission with all of the declassified details redacted. Or she'd tell him about her latest attempt at a hobby, in an effort to craft a better cover, as she put it, or how to learn how to be a person, as Sam did. Or, if they'd ended up standing quietly in the middle of a stopped subway car for twenty minutes because there was a switch problem up the line, it would have been companionable instead of intensely awkward.

Steve hasn't spent enough time with Bruce to call him a friend, Steve could begrudgingly see the value behind trying to get to know the other Avengers in a context outside of the world ending, but Bruce was always willing to try to explain whatever he was currently working on in the lab on a level that Steve could understand. Most of the time it went over his head anyways, it was nice to listen to despite that, since Bruce never condescended.

Bruce also liked to talk about the various parts of the world that he traveled to, both the ones he went to in an attempt to keep ahead of the various militaries of the world and the ones he went to for fun. Steve had really only been to America and Europe, now and in the past. Bucky apparently was rarely deployed outside of those places and Hydra seemed to keep most of their most important bases in those locations as wells, so there was no need. Bruce was good at describing the locals vividly enough that Steve felt that he could draw them without referring to a picture.

Nobody could shut Tony up, least of all Steve. Tony's way of interacting with people seemed to be heavily based around trying to push their buttons. Steve was better at not talking it seriously after some of the prolonged discussions they'd had about Zola and Hydra. There had been a steep learning curve. Tony was much more tolerable now that Steve had gotten better at figuring out how to wind Tony up and direct his stream of consciousness in less irritating directions. Bringing up Pepper helped, as did mentioning Bucky's arm.

Him and Clint had been thrown together on enough missions back when SHIELD had still been around that they could talk for a while without saying anything of importance. Mostly, Clint liked to spin increasingly elaborate stories about his childhood that Steve knew were ripped off from various tv shows. At first, Steve had been taken in, but as his pop culture knowledge expanded, he'd quickly caught on. Clint still tried it and Steve couldn't tell if Clint knew that Steve knew and kept bullshitting about it because he enjoyed doing it, or if he thought Steve was kind of an idiot.

All Thor wanted to talk about was battle, glorious battle, in some kind of rhyme scheme that Steve hadn't bothered identifying. That part was fine, the part that wasn't fine is that Thor would always start to say something about Loki, typically a quip that Loki had thrown out while stabbing something with a dagger, and then stop, downcast. Sometimes he'd gather up the strength to go on to the climax of his story, and the end of every single story of Thor's was about how he bashed some huge thing with a hammer until it stopped moving and then he feasted in high style with all of his friends for days. Most of the time, he didn't. Either way, all of Thor's stories ended with him sad and staring out the window at an darkening sky.

Steve had some sympathy for him. He'd read Bucky's file. He knew Bucky had been forced to do some horrible things. However, that was the key difference: Bucky had been brainwashed into committing atrocities. There was no evidence that Loki had committed genocide under compulsion, despite what Thor sometimes implied.

At least part of his foul mood came from the fact that Thor was the one that insisted on the subway. They'd drawn the metaphorical short straws in figuring out who was getting the food; Tony had had Jarvis randomly pick, though Steve thought he might have rigged it so that he'd wouldn't have to go. Since everybody was supposed to be bonding, that meant two of them were sent out. Steve would have preferred getting on his bike and getting it over with faster, so they could spend more time all together, as he'd tried to spin it, but he'd been outvoted.

Thor had turned down Tony's offer to lend them a car, saying that he wanted a chance to get out and see the glory of New York when not fighting aliens. Steve had felt petty for being annoyed about it, but as the time that they spent crowded together stretched longer, he was starting to seriously regret not insisting on it. He could only read the ads along the top of the subway car so many times.

"Steve," Thor said in what was probably his quietest voice.

"Huh?" Steve replied, eloquently.

"When we first entered here, a lady grasped your arm. Is this a custom that is common among your compatriots that I do not know?" Thor asked.

A woman had stumbled against Steve when they'd gotten on and grabbed his forearm. She'd then blushed and mumbled something about mistaking it for a grip. Steve was almost proud of Thor for waiting until long after she'd gotten off at her stop. He felt embarrassed enough by being felt up by random strangers, he didn't need Thor calling attention to it to make it worse.

Sometimes Steve would grumble to himself about how this type of thing didn't happen in the 40s. Then, he'd remember the many, many times that it had during his time selling war bonds. A lot of housewives would let their hands linger on his arms when handing him their babies to be kissed. Some of the bolder women heading up the war effort by toiling away building munitions would let their hands slip down when they were posing for pictures with him. Heck, right after he'd first been unbuckled from Howard's machine, he recalls through the haze of pain that both Dr. Erskine and Peggy had touched his chest.

"Uh, no. It's not a custom." Steve answered.

"The only planet I've been to where this occurs is Earth. Every time I go forth without Jane, a lady will touch me like that lady did with you. I asked Tony and he told me it was so."

"Tony thinks it's funny to say things that aren't true."

"I gathered, but what then is the meaning?"

Steve looked around. They were entirely surrounded by people that were trying hard not to make it obvious that they were hanging onto every word and were probably going to tweet about it as soon as they got cell service. The one exception was a small group of two men and one woman decked out in tourist gear holding large backpacks. Steve had noticed them at the beginning of this indeterminable ride, his awareness of people that looked like they knew how to fight had alerted him to them at once, but they'd been on the other end of the car and had looked like they were genuinely on a vacation.

Now, not so much. Over the course of their unscheduled stop, they'd very slowly started pushing their way towards Steve and Thor. Steve had nudged Thor when he'd seen that, and Thor had nodded in acknowledgment. He'd assumed that they were trying, like almost everyone else, to try to get a selfie with them. The fact that they'd put away their phones and were gripping their strangely shinny bags tightly raised a lot of red flags.

Steve was concerned about all of the civilians around them. Steve hadn't brought his shield with him in an attempt to blend in better and Thor didn't have his hammer either. While Mjolnir could be called to Thor if necessary, Steve wasn't sure if Thor can direct it so that it won't smash into the subway and cause a lot of property damage. Thor had assured them all that he had enough control over it so that innocents wouldn't be harmed while it flies towards him, but Thor was almost as bad as the Hulk when it came to smashing things up. Steve wasn't always that great about it either, to be honest. 

It's still a fight of three against two. Unless they've got something Steve's never seen before in those bags, he'd bet it was an attack of opportunity and they're seriously outclassed and know it.

"Steve," Thor prompted.

"It doesn't mean anything. They just want to feel your muscles." Steve replied and reached up to point to the group that was now about five feet away in the guise of scratching his cheek. It wasn't his most subtle move.

Thor grinned. "Ah, I thought that might be so," he said. He then held his arm out slightly.

Steve knew what that meant. Thor was calling Mjolnir. More importantly, it meant that Steve was probably going to have to extend his stay in New York at least another week to deal with all of the favors he was going to have to trade in to deal with it.

He was about to gesture to Thor and get him to stop. They didn't need it. But the shortest man, the one wearing the I Love NY shirt, chose that moment to dash forwards and slam Steve with his bag. Whatever was in there packed more of a wallop than he'd expected, maybe there was more of a plan than he'd given them credit for.

He could hear the other passengers in the car start to scream but not the sound of breaking glass that would signal Thor's hammer was near. He reached out and tried to rip the backpack out of the hands of his attacker, but as soon as he touched it his knees buckled. His knees suddenly felt too weak to hold him up, and he could barely summon the strength to close his hands around the straps.

He had some awareness of Thor grappling with the other two behind him, and then Thor too was on the ground.

Steve jerked his hands back and immediately felt better. The man pushed the bag forward to try to keep it in contact with Steve's skin and he noticed that the man was wearing unseasonably warm gloves to handle it.

"Don't let them touch their bags to your skin," Steve yelled out to Thor. He jumped up and grabbed two of the straps to swing himself up and away from the man.

The two other assailants had surrounded Thor and were pressing on him with their backpacks. He was feebly trying to get away from them, but clearly couldn't summon the strength to do so.

Steve shifted his weight to his left hand, let go with his right, and smacked into the back of the woman, knocking her Yankees' cap off and to the ground where it belonged. She dropped the bag onto Thor's stomach, which had to hurt, but fortunately in an area that was completely covered by fabric.

The unmistakable sound of Mjolnr breaking through a subway window rang out and it hit the man cornering Thor in the head, causing him to stumble back far enough for Thor to regain his feet.

Steve's original attacker threw his bag towards Steve, connecting with his left arm and causing him to fall hard onto the subway seats. All of the passengers were packed as tightly as they could on the other side of the car, so he didn't slam into one of them and injure them.

Thor had knocked the other man unconscious and was currently struggling with the woman. She was the best of the three at fighting with the bag and had managed to graze Thor's bare arms several times as Steve watched.

He was straining to sit up and shift the bag off of his neck, where it had landed, before the man in the NY shirt could reclaim it. He felt weaker than he could ever remember feeling in his life, worse even than when he was a kid, but with a monumental effort, he was able to move those crucial two inches.

The bag's power neutralized, but not its weight, he sprung to his feet. Right before the man could get a hold of it again, Steve kicked it away towards the door between the cabins. He noticed several people in the next car over pressed up against the glass, filming it with their phones.

Knocking the man unconscious now that he was weaponless was short work. Steve almost felt insulted that they hadn't thought to bring a gun as a backup.

Steve turned to see the woman land a solid blow on Thor's head. Thor's head snapped back. Steve jumped over and grabbed her one of her arms, keeping her from continuing to hit him.

Thor's hammer swung around and connected just hard enough to also stun her unconscious.

"Only three were sent to challenge us?" Thor asked.

"I think so," Steve replied, scanning the other passengers for the tell tale bags and didn't see any. "Do any of you have rope or something I can use to tie them up?"

Duct tape was produced and the subway lurched back into motion right after they'd finished wrapping them up. The passengers broke out into spontaneous applause.

"I'm sorry, but can I just take a picture with the two of you?" A young woman asked, edging forward and holding up her phone.

"It would be our pleasure," Thor said.

Steve dutifully went over to stand next to her. Thor put his arm around her and she, in return, put one of hers around Steve's waist. As she took the picture, her hand grazed Steve's ass. Figures.


End file.
